Tag Index / Showing 1 - 8 of 8 results for “GPS”

It's getting easier to follow users as they walk through the digital landscape. New data-driven marketing tools can extract increasingly meaningful and nuanced insights from peoples' footprints—including their credit card statements, web browsing history, and social media history. When I say nuanced, I mean nuanced: retail stores are even using customers’ phone GPS to track how long they stand in the yogurt aisle. This makes older techniques like retargeting—a cookie-based technology that keeps brands visible even after traffic has bounced—seem like a shot in the dark. More

What inefficiencies frustrate you in your day-to-day life? What could work better about your home and the things that surround you—your car, your commute, your job, your health care, your aging parent's physical situation, or your local government? Entrepreneurs and innovators are beginning determinedly to address those problems. How can I be so confident? Because of the macro trend that some, including we at Techonomy, call the "Internet of Everything" (IoE for shorthand). We see it as a big deal worth devoting a half day to, along with a superb group of speakers, at our Techonomy Lab: Man, Machines, and the Network on May 16. More

In the Mexican city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez in Chiapas state, an interesting experiment is unfolding that could be an early forerunner of a future trend—the use of cell phones as sensors.
Under the city's "Vigilante Taxi Driver" program, cab drivers use GPS-enabled cell phones to send messages and photographs about everything from accidents and potholes to burst water mains, downed streetlights and criminal activity—effectively acting as additional eyes and ears of government to combat high crime rates and run-down infrastructure. The reports go to a control center for routing to the appropriate government agency. More

The rapid rise of location-based services (LBS) on the Internet is spawning a new generation of start-up companies, with taxi finders one of the latest to join the trend. Such apps use GPS technology to create services that rely on a person’s location, such as helping that person to find nearby restaurants or shops. Just this week a friend was telling me about one such new LBS to help frustrated consumers find taxis, and now we’re reading about two other companies that are moving onto the investor radar with their own new tie-ups. More

A standard trope these days is that we in the middle class have been slogging through a couple of decades of woe. Wages are stagnant. Our standard of living isn’t improving. The grand forces of our time—the Internet and globalization—are failing to better our lives, and may be making things worse. The numbers prove it. But here’s the problem: the traditional numbers used by the government and economists measure the wrong stuff for the twenty-first century. More

China’s economic miracle has captured global headlines for much of the last 30 years, but a much quieter revolution has also taken place in that time at the nation’s toilets. As China’s leading commercial center, Shanghai has been at the edge of this quieter revolution, which has just flushed past another milestone with the announcement of a new mobile app to help people locate the nearest public toilet. The new app uses GPS technology to locate the nearest of 8,000 public toilets now operating in Shanghai for users who feel the call of nature while walking around or driving outside. More

Clayton Christensen's model of business disruption posits that new players can topple industry giants by attacking the low end of a market and building towards competitiveness at the higher margin. But this once-groundbreaking model may already be obsolete. In a recent Harvard Business Review report, Larry Downes and Paul F. Nunes argue that the pace of disruption is happening much faster these days, requiring industry leaders to take more radical precautionary measures. They cite as an example the GPS equipment market, which was upended by smartphone apps before manufacturers had a chance to adapt, with Garmin losing 70% of its market capitalization in the two years after navigation apps were introduced. More

In this 10-minute talk from Techonomy 2011 in Tuscon, Ariz., Fred Krupp, President of the Environmental Defense Fund, discusses how new techonoloy is helping to monitor and protect fisheries from over fishing. Data collection using video cameras and powerful software is helping local fisheries in Canada sustain their fish populations by calculating yearly fishing limits for fishermen. More